A long time ago, I started to write a story about a world in which
people lived their entire lives in an Internet virtual
reality.

I wanted to write a dystopian story because I felt that all the
most famous dystopian stories are exaggerated beyond the point of
being realistic. The TV Tropes article on dystopias captures my
feelings at the time:

"A dystopia is a social commentary literally in the background, as
is a utopian setting. The two settings share a problem in sometimes
being a little too one-note. The author is thinking “capitalism
sucks!”, for instance, and everything wrong with the world turns
out be clearly the fault of nasty Corrupt Corporate Executives and
their nasty, greedy megacorporations. Conversely, it could be
“governments suck!” and the corporations are the last line of
defense against the evil, totalitarian bureaucrats."

I do think novels like Brave New World provide important lessons,
but the lessons are so spelled out that they start to come off as
lectures that are forced down your throat. After John hanged
himself at the end of Brave New World, I half expected him to
suddenly wake up, noose still tight around his neck, and tell me,
Arrested Development style, “And THAT’S why you don’t precondition
people to become docile and incapable of independent
thought!”

The kind of dystopian story I wanted to create wasn’t much of a
dystopian story at all. I wanted to create a world in which it
isn’t really clear whether it’s a utopia or a dystopia, even by the
end of the story. (I’m sure stories like these exist, but I don’t
currently know of any.) My Internet world would not be like the
dystopian world of Forster’s The Machine Stops, which, like Brave
New World and every other dystopian story, takes too many cheap
shots. People are not going to stop valuing love, or sex, or
original ideas or face-to-face contact or traveling outside of
their tiny hexagonal cells.

The world I envisioned was a virtual reality that simulates the
stimuli for all five of your senses so completely that it is
indistinguishable from real life. Images appear as if they’re
actually right in front of you; food tastes as if you’re actually
eating it; sex feels as if you’re actually having it. It’s like The
Matrix, except that machines aren’t the ones subjecting us to it.
We create our own Matrix and voluntarily immerse ourselves in it. I
always thought this would be a more likely situation.

It would be a world that perfectly reproduces all of the
experiences we know and value from our beloved physical plane of
existence, without having to sacrifice anything. Yes, it wouldn’t
be technically face-to-face contact to meet someone online this
way, but it would be difficult to construct an argument that
explains what makes it any different in practice. Love still
exists. Individuality still exists. Art still exists. But there
wouldn’t be any of the problems associated with living in the
physical world, for the simple reason that virtual resources are
infinite. Things like hunger, disease, brutality, etc. would all be
not only wiped out, but IMPOSSIBLE within the virtual world–the
programming simply would not include these things. You wouldn’t
even have to experience any physical pain (unless, you know, you’re
into that, in which case you can ask to have it included in your
body’s programming).

In effect, the world I envisioned was more like the world of The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, but without the catch–no one has to
suffer for the good of society. For all intents and purposes, it
would be a perfect utopia.

But then the question becomes: How do you find meaning in a world
in which nobody suffers? It’s a pertinent question because if this
kind of society is not desirable, what good does it do us to try to
eradicate the world’s problems?

The idea of games is a big theme in many of my favorite books, like
Card’s Ender’s Game, Strauss’ The Game, McGonigal’s Reality Is
Broken, etc., and I wanted it to be a big theme of my story as
well. When there is no suffering, everything becomes a game. There
are winners and losers, but ultimately, the outcome of the game has
no significant consequences. It’s just a distraction.

But my main character, Jack (a temporary name that I wanted to
change later), wants life to be more than just a game, and as a
result he feels detached from a society that places such heavy
emphasis on gaming. He wants to be a real hero in a world where the
only heroes are generals in pretend wars.

The main plot was going to be about Jack meeting a girl, because
that’s what all of my stories are about, naturally. It’s a typical
manic pixie dream girl romance (also what all of my stories are
about) in which the girl’s infectious exuberance allows the
brooding male hero to feel excitement again. Jack falls in love
with her, loses his feelings of detachment and starts to find
meaning in his life.

And then, she disappears. One day, she simply isn’t there, and she
leaves no trace of her existence. For the rest of the story, Jack
tries to figure out what the hell happened, to no avail. There’s a
part in which he sees another girl who talks using one of the
unique mannerisms of the girl he loved. The two girls look nothing
alike, but through the power of Internet anonymity, it could easily
be the same girl that he met before, using a different avatar. He
accosts her, and she insists she has no idea who he is. He starts
looking like a crazy person in front of everyone until the
moderator decides to boot him from the server.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to end this story, which is one of
the reasons I never continued with it. That’s the problem with
writing a story that isn’t just one-note. There’s no obvious
ending. I definitely wasn’t going to take the cop-out route and
have Jack kill himself, even if he had experienced anything drastic
enough to merit that, which he hadn’t. I think I wanted Jack to
just stay in the virtual world, and do his best to cope with the
way the world is. It’s sort of an anticlimax, but that’s how life
is. Life is full of anticlimaxes.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that you can never
really know people. My virtual reality world is a good medium for
demonstrating this principle. First, the anonymity of the Internet
makes it extraordinarily easy to put up walls and avoid investment.
Second, nobody experiences any suffering with which others can
empathize. Both of these phenomena thus heighten the impersonal
nature of people’s interactions.

But it doesn’t take a different world to show that you can never
really know people. Lots of books explore this principle (John
Green’s Looking for Alaska comes to mind.) And in fact, I had an
experience similar to Jack’s just recently.

A girl messaged me on OkCupid. The first two sentences of her
message read, “You are my dream dude. That being said, I’ve only
been on this site for two days so I’m going to assume you are too
good to be true.” I looked at her profile, and she didn’t really
seem like my type, but I always like it when a girl is
straightforward. I was busy at the time, but a couple weeks later,
we met up in San Francisco.

It was one of the best dates I’ve been on in a while. We had
dinner, then went to a bar and talked about anything and everything
until we had no awareness of time. At one point, she told me I was
exactly the way she’d imagined. There was a photo booth at the bar,
so we took some pictures. I suggested we kiss for the last one, and
we did, just in time for the camera. We went to another bar, talked
some more, went into the back where there was a completely deserted
dance floor, and danced and made out. We went back to her place,
where we watched a movie and fell asleep. She drove me to the BART
station in the morning. I rode home, thinking that, against my
expectations, she just might be exactly what I need right
now.

Three weeks and a few texts from me later, that morning is still
the last I’ve heard from her. Like Jack, I’ve been spending a lot
of time trying to work out what happened.

Maybe she just wanted to have fun for one night, and does not feel
any explanation is necessary.

Maybe she has drama going on with an ex or something that’s
preventing her from contacting me.

Maybe she was arrested.

Maybe I am socially clueless and she actually didn’t enjoy the date
at all.

Maybe, through some weird technological error, her phone hasn’t
received any of my messages, and she’s been waiting for me to
contact her the whole time.

Maybe she got into a serious accident and wound up in the
hospital.

Maybe she was actually a pre-op transsexual and is afraid to
contact me again until after her operation because she thinks I’ll
be really weirded out if I find out she has a penis.

I can go crazy thinking about these things too much. I mean,
literally crazy. As in, I find myself starting to wonder whether
the date actually happened at all. Perhaps I hallucinated the whole
thing.

If she were to contact me again, I’d be completely okay with
anything she told me. I mean, we only went on one date. If she
wanted to go on another date, great. If she wanted to just be
friends, that’s cool, I can handle that. If she wanted to be very
casual acquaintances who rarely contact each other, I can handle
that. And if she just never wanted to see or hear from me again, I
can handle that too.

The only thing I can’t handle is not knowing what the hell
happened.

And yet, here I am, in an impersonal world that is only destined to
become more impersonal, trying desperately to attribute meaning to
an experience that I will probably never fully understand.

I wanted to create a dystopian story that wasn’t just one-note,
that didn’t have clear answers. So here’s the question: is the
virtual reality world a dystopia, in which the circumstances ruin
people’s ability to make deep connections with each other and live
meaningful lives? Or is it a utopia, and is Jack the one who needs
to grow up and accept a world that’s as perfect as a world can
reasonably be expected to be?

Can I really blame a girl for not returning my texts, when no one
should reasonably have any obligation to contact someone after a
single date?

I know that a more mature person would be able to just accept
something like this and move on. But I derive the entire meaning of
my existence from the connections I make with other people. Yet, so
often when I interact with people, it feels like there’s some kind
of disconnect. People rarely just tell you candidly what’s really
going on. Maybe to avoid confrontation, maybe because they’re
afraid of being exposed, maybe just because they don’t know how.
Whatever the reason, this isn’t the first time something like this
has happened, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I graduated from UC Berkeley in the spring of 2010
with a degree in Cognitive Science with a
math minor. I am
still in the East Bay and am currently working as a tutor in SAT
prep. Essentially, my job is to widen the education gap by only
helping students who can afford to purchase their way to better
scores, but my work somehow manages to be surprisingly fulfilling
anyway. Such is the paradox that is full-time tutoring.

Test-taking: I took the SAT once and got a 2330. That was before I
spent four years analyzing the SAT for a living. I'm excited to see
how I do on the GRE (which, incidentally, is written by the same
company that writes the SAT).

More recently, I've been getting into speed running. I run Donkey
Kong Country 2 and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. I
currently have the #2 fastest time in North America for beating
Tropical Freeze (1:36:09 on 8/12/14). I've achieved a few world
records on the individual levels. Here's
one.

Memorizing: In high school I memorized 200 digits of pi just for
fun. One of my a cappella groups once incorporated this fact into a
song called "Gangsta" (sung in gangsta rap style):
"The name is Chris, and I'm a G
You'd get all the ladies too if you had hair like me
Do you know anyone else who knows pi all the way?
It's 3.141592653589793238462643383---"
"Okay!"
Seriously, though, memorizing pi is not that difficult. You just
have to come up with some good mnemonics. For example, for the 1592
bit, think of it as exactly one century after Columbus sailed the
ocean blue.

Running: I did
cross country and track in high school, and although I was below
average compared to the rest of my team, I'm still fairly pleased
with the mile I ran in 5:12 my senior year. I recently ran my first
half-marathon in San Francisco. Despite taking five shots and
getting about half an hour of sleep the night before, I managed to
finish in 1:48:43. I've been wanting to do another sometime soon,
but I don't have any training buddies right now. Hint hint ;)

You might have noticed that my profile blurbs are sort of
disjointed. That is intentional. I wrote them in bits and pieces,
at different times, in different moods, so that you can see
different sides of me.

Also, since this is where people usually put this sort of thing,
I'm half Japanese, half white, in case you were curious.

optimal solutions to my everyday problems. How do I divvy up the
time slots in my schedule to satisfy the greatest possible number
of my students? (Answer: turn it into a constraint satisfaction
problem.) How do I find a route from house to house that minimizes
driving time, gas usage, and traffic-induced stress? (Answer: turn
it into a graph search problem.) What are the optimal strategies
for such activities as walking, making friends, and playing Super
Mario 64? (Answers: here, here, and here, respectively.)

Bathroom humor is the funniest thing in the world to me. During the
holidays, my sister and I enjoy singing to the Hallelujah chorus,
replacing each "Hallelujah" with "Diarrhea." Let me know if you'd
like to request a performance.

No, seriously, you can message me for whatever reason. The act of
sending a first message to a guy at all is already defying
stereotypes in the best possible way, so far be it from me to
discourage you from doing so.